Recyled art: Who’s your daddy? | Another Bouncing Ball

Thompson showed up half-a-century later in the work of Christopher Lux, images here, who’s doing it on purpose. Lux:

This is work from a consumerist eye, an exercise of interpretation, the work of others used in a search for my own voice. Identity is no longer based on creation of something from nothing, but an attachment to a collection of images and ideas, juxtaposed just so, to create ‘the individual.’ Like listing bands, television shows, books and movies as a means to attain a whole. As we surround ourselves with the ghostly remains of history that passed us by, the longing to have taken part in it, overwhelms us and confines us to a life of digging through the trash to find ourselves.

Appropriation not only continues, it’s edging close to the core of contemporary aesthetics. Increasingly, artists explore the ramifications of living in a borrowed world on borrowed time.

The artist’s statement for Second Peoples at The Helm Gallery in Tacoma offers an excellent formulation of the position:

We have coined the name ‘second peoples’ to describe the people who arrive late on the scene, after the beginning, after the abundance, after the traumatic event, after everything’s been said and done, after, even, the end.

We are the second peoples. Chances are, you are too.
This is an exhibition dealing with what it means to be second. We inhabit a landscape of iteration, reverb, elision, and generational noise. Our corner of North America – these mountains, that timber, this rich land – belonged to someone else. Our popular culture-those TV shows, that movie sequel, this new band that is so retro they’re cool-belonged to some other time. Our art is that way, too: this gesture to Donald Judd, that nod to Philip Guston, that Eva Hesse wink.

We are interested in locating the coordinates of this second position. How did we end up here? What is our responsibility for what happened before us? What is our responsibility for the things that happen now in our names? Like Simone de Beauvoir argues in “Second Sex”, we think we should be free to transcend ourselves as subjects, to not be confined to existential leftovers.

Contemporary art is concerned with this alchemy, trying to turn second-handedness into first-handedness, reversing the flow of energy, presenting not representing, creating value from valuelessness. We think this is a worthwhile activity. We also think it is a fraught activity. The work in this exhibition exposes some of the fractures created by this ceaseless turning, and also dreams of a third position, a reification of our desire to escape, a momentary place to stop.

Note to self: Get thee to Tacoma to see this show. (Till May 14)

I’m not convinced Lux moves Thompson any further than Sherrie Levine took Walker Evans in the 1980s. At least he’s conscious of his strategy.

Compare George Benjamin Luks’ Danty from 1915 at the Frye Art Museum (#3)

to Ryan Hixenbaugh’s Untitled (kid) from 2008.